Я остаюсь (I Remain) by Nina Berberova

I remain with what was not fully said,
With what was not fully sung, not played out,
Not written to the end, in a secret society,
In the quiet fellowship of the unsuccessful,
Who lived in rustling pages
And now talk in whispers.
They even forewarned us in youth,
but we didn’t want another fate,
And, in general, it wasn’t so bad;
And it even happens – those who didn’t finish
Laughing, didn’t finish dancing take us on trust.

We didn’t succeed, as many didn’t succeed,
For example – all world history
And, as I’ve heard, the universe itself.
But how we cackled, carried in the wind!
About what? And is that important?
They stole the baggage in the station long ago
(So they told us), and burned the books
(So they taught us), the river became shallow,
The forest was cut down and the house burned up,
And the burial mound is grown over
With thistle (So they wrote us),
And the old watchman long ago is not on the job.

Don’t tear form from content
And allow me yet to say in farewell,
That we’ve made peace with our fate,
And you just keep on in a cheerful march
Striding in platoons, showing off to elders.

by Нина Николаевна Берберова
(Nina Nikolayevna Berberova)
(1959)
translated by Albert C. Todd

Я остаюсь

Я остаюсь с недосказавшими,
С недопевшими, недоигравшими,
С недописавшими. В тайном обществе,
В тихом сообществе недоуспевших,
Которые жили в листах шелестевших
И шепотом нынче говорят.
Хоть в юности нас и предупреждали,
Но мы другой судьбы не хотели,
И, в общем, не так уж было скверно;
И даже бывает — нам верят на слово
Дохохотавшие, доплясавшие.

Мы не удались, как не удалось многое,
Например — вся мировая история
И, как я слышала, сама вселенная.
Но как мы шуршали, носясь по ветру!
О чем? Да разве это существенно?
Багаж давно украли на станции
(Так нам сказали), и книги сожгли
(Так нас учили), река обмелела,
Вырублен лес, и дом сгорел,
И затянулся чертополохом
Могильный холм (так нам писали),
А старый сторож давно не у дел.

Не отрывайте формы от содержания,
И позвольте еще сказать на прощание,
Что мы примирились с нашей судьбой.
А вы продолжайте бодрым маршем
Шагать повзводно, козыряя старшим.

Berberova’s father was an Armenian who worked in the Tsar’s Ministry of Finance; her mother came from the landed gentry. In the early 1920s Berberova’s poetry was noted in the literary salons of Petrograd. In 1922, along with her husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, she received permission to leave Russia. At first they lived with Maksim Gorky in Italy and Berlin and then settled in Paris, where they were divorced in 1932. For fifteen years Berberova worked for the Paris Russian newspaper Posledniye novosti and published several novels, the most successful of which was Tchaikovsky (1936). In 1950 she moved to the United States, where she taught at Princeton University until her retirement.

Fame came to her at the age of seventy-two when she published her autobiography, Kursiv moi (The Italics Are Mine). Caustic and unsparing , the book provoked a mixed reaction in émigré circles, but in the USSR it became a coveted item on the literary black market. In 1988 Berberova made a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union; where she discovered that she had become famous in her homeland.

Biographical information about Berberova, p.413, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Клён ты мой опавший (My Leafless Maple Tree…) by Sergey Yesenin

My leafless maple tree, your icy coating,
Why do you stand here bowed, in the white blizzard?

Or did you hear something? Did you see something?
As if you’d gone walking beyond the village confines,

And like a drunken watchman, setting off down the road,
Got buried in a snowdrift, so your legs froze hard?

Like you I’m none too steady either on my pins,
I’ll not make it back from this drinking bout with my friends.

What’s this? A willow tree! And over there’s a pine!
I sing them songs of summer to the snowstorm’s whine.

It seems to me that I’m just like the maple tree,
Only not stripped bare all covered in green.

And in a drunken stupor, shameless and uncontrite,
I embrace a little birch, like someone else’s bride.

by Сергей Александрович Есенин
(Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin)
a.k.a. Sergey Yesenin / Esenin
(1925)
translated by Daniel Weissbort

Клён ты мой опавший

Клён ты мой опавший, клён заледенелый,
Что стоишь, нагнувшись, под метелью белой?
Или что увидел? Или что услышал?
Словно за деревню погулять ты вышел
И, как пьяный сторож, выйдя на дорогу,
Утонул в сугробе, приморозил ногу.
Ах, и сам я нынче чтой-то стал нестойкий,
Не дойду до дома с дружеской попойки.
Там вон встретил вербу, там сосну приметил,
Распевал им песни под метель о лете.
Сам себе казался я таким же кленом,
Только не опавшим, а вовсю зеленым.
И, утратив скромность, одуревши в доску,
Как жену чужую, обнимал березку.

28 ноября 1925

The poem read by Павел Севостьянов (Pavel Sevostyanov) with the musical piece ‘Oltremare’ by Ludovico Einaudi

Yesenin was born in a peasant family and grew up in the religiously strict home of his grandfather, who was an Old Believer. He went to Moscow as a youth and studied at the A. L. Shanyansky Peoples’ University from 1912 to 1915 while he worked as a proofreader. Yesenin was perhaps the most Russian poet of all time, for the poetry of no one else was so formed from the rustling of birch trees, from the soft patter of raindrops on thatch-roofed peasant huts, from the neighing of horses in mist-filled morning meadows, from the clanking of bells on cows’ necks, from the swaying of chamomile and cornflower, from the singing in the outskirts of villages. Yesenin’s verses were not so much written by pen as breathed out of Russian nature. His poems, born in folklore, gradually themselves were transformed into folklore.

Yesenin’s first poetry was published in journals in 1914. Still very much a village boy from the Ryazan province when he arrived in the St. Petersburg world of literary salons in 1915, he wrote afterward that “it was as if a Ryazan mare had splashed his piss on the emasculated snobbish elite.” He did not turn into a salon poet; after a night of carousing he would pretend to catch grasshoppers from the fields of the peasant childhood with the silk hat taken from his golden head. Yesenin called himself the “last poet of the village” and saw himself as a foal maddened by the fire-breathing locomotive of industrialisation. He extolled the Revolution, but, failing at times to understand “where these fateful events are leading us,” he diverted himself with heavy drinking and hooliganism.

The roots of the national character of his poetry were so deep that they remained with him during all his wandering abroad. It was not from mere chance that he sensed himself an inalienable part of Russian nature – “As silently as in their turn / The trees shed leaves, I shed these lines” – and that nature was one of the embodiments of his own self, that he was now an ice-covered maple, now a ginger moon. Yesenin’s feeling of his native land extended into feeling for the limitless star-filled universe, which he also made human and domestic: “[A dog’s] tears, like golden stars, / Trickled down into the snow.”

With Nikolai Klyuyev, Vadim Shershenevich, and Anatoly Mariengof, Yesenin was one of the leaders of Imaginism, which gave priority to form and stressed imagery as a foundation of poetry. Yesenin sought friendship with Vladimir Mayakovsky and at the same time carried on a polemic with him in verse form. They were totally different poets. No other poet engaged in such candid confessions that left him vulnerable, though sometimes they were concealed in riotous behavior. All of Yesenin’s feelings and thoughts, even his searching and casting about, pulsed in him openly, like blue veins under skin so tenderly transparent as to be nonexistent. Never a rhetorical poet, he exhibited the highest personal courage in “Black Man” and many other poems, when he slapped on the table of history his own steaming heart, shuddering in convulsions – a real, living heart, so unlike the hearts of playing-card decks that dextrous poetic card sharks trump with the ace of spades.

Yesenin’s ill-fated marriage to Isadora Duncan exacerbated his personal tragedy. He tried to find salvation in vodka and gained a reputation as a hooligan. After writing his final poem in his own blood, Yesenin hanged himself in a room of the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. A story circulated that he was in fact killed.

For the confessional honesty of his poetry he was loved by his fellow Russians. Indeed, it is safe to say that no other poet’s work has ever enjoyed such genuinely universal popularity. Literally everyone read and reads him: peasants, workers, the most sophisticated intellectuals. The secret of his popularity is simple: an extraordinary candor both in his celebration of Russia and in his own self revelations. His grave is perpetually scattered with flowers left by admiring readers – taxi drivers, workers, students, and simple Russian grandmothers.

Biographical information about Yesenin, p.289-90, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты… (Autumn Nears…) by Aleksey Eisner

Autumn nears. The branches yellow.
And again the heart is ripped to shreds…
A human’s life begins with sorrow, while you
cling to a butterfly-brief happiness.

A human’s life begins with sorrow. Just look:
the hothouse roses in him choke to death.
While from some distant path awaiting sunrise
the steamboats wail of parting in the night.

A human’s life begins… No, wait a second,
There are no words to help us here at all.
Outside the window poured a heavy rain.
You’re ready for the rain, as a bird of flight.

In the woods our footprints melt,
as pallid passions melt into the past –
Those meager storms in a glass of water…
And again the heart is ripped to shreds.

A human’s life begins… Briefly. From the shoulder.
Goodbye. Enough. An enormous dot…
Sky, wind, and sea. And the seagulls cry.
And from the stern a handkerchief is waved.

Sail away. Only circles of black smoke.
The distance already lasts one hundred years.
Take care of that many-coloured happiness of yours –
one day you’ll be a human too, you know.

The sky-blue world will ring, then fall to pieces,
you snow-white throat will moan like a dove,
and the polar night will swim above you,
and, Titanic-like, a pillow will drown in tears.

But already dipping in the arctic ice,
those fervent hands are growing cold forever.
And the wooden steamboat then casts off
and sails, rocking, for the Separation Pole.

The wet kerchief writhes and the trace grows foamy,
as on the day… But I see you’ve forgotten it all.
In thousands of versts, and for thousands of years,
the censer clangs, hopeless and doomed.

Well that’s that. Only dark, gloomy rumors of paradise…
The Mediterranean makes an indifferent noise.
It’s growing dark. All right, then. Sail and die:
A human’s life begins with sorrow.

by Алексей Владимирович Эйснер
(Aleksey Vladimirovich Eisner)
translated by Bradley Jordan and Katya Zubritskaya
(1932)

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты…

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты.
И опять разрывается сердце на части.
Человек начинается с горя. А ты
Простодушно хранишь мотыльковое счастье.

Человек начинается с горя. Смотри,
Задыхаются в нем парниковые розы.
А с далеких путей в ожиданьи зари
О разлуке ревут по ночам паровозы.

Человек начинается… Нет. Подожди.
Никакие слова ничему не помогут.
За окном тяжело зашумели дожди.
Ты, как птица к полету, готова в дорогу.

А в лесу расплываются наши следы,
Расплываются в памяти бледные страсти –
Эти бедные бури в стакане воды.
И опять разрывается сердце на части.

Человек начинается… Кратко. С плеча.
До свиданья. Довольно. Огромная точка.
Небо, ветер и море. И чайки кричат.
И с кормы кто-то жалобно машет платочком.

Уплывай. Только черного дыма круги.
Расстоянье уже измеряется веком.
Разноцветное счастье свое береги, –
Ведь когда-нибудь станешь и ты человеком.

Зазвенит и рассыплется мир голубой,
Белоснежное горло как голубь застонет,
И полярная ночь проплывет над тобой,
И подушка в слезах как Титаник потонет…

Но, уже погружаясь в Арктический лед,
Навсегда холодеют горячие руки.
И дубовый отчаливает пароход
И, качаясь, уходит на полюс разлуки.

Вьется мокрый платочек, и пенится след,
Как тогда… Но я вижу, ты всё позабыла.
Через тысячи верст и на тысячи лет
Безнадежно и жалко бряцает кадило.

Вот и всё. Только темные слухи про рай…
Равнодушно шумит Средиземное море.
Потемнело. Ну что ж. Уплывай. Умирай.
Человек начинается с горя.

Additional information: Alexey Vladimirovich Eisner (Алексе́й Влади́мирович Э́йснер), (5 October 1905, St. Petersburg – 30 November 1984, Moscow), was a Soviet poet, translator and writer.

After the October Revolution of 1917, his stepfather brought the young Eisner to the Princes’ Islands. Thus began a life in exile. Eisner graduated from the Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich Russian Cadets Corps in Sarajevo. He remained in Europe where he made a living washing windows and working at construction sites. He started writing poetry and met with many famous Russian émigrés such as Georgy Adamovich, Marina Tsvetaeva and her husband Sergei Efron.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War which he took part in, he reportedly ran into Ernest Hemingway who wrote him a blank cheque that Hemingway ensured him he could draw upon should he choose to visit Hemingway in the United States. Eisner returned to the Soviet Union in January 1940 without cashing the cheque. Four months later, his was searched by the secret police, who found the blank cheque signed by Ernest Hemingway. He was arrested and sentenced under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the USSR to 8 years of hard labour in the Vorkuta camp. After completion of this period he was sent for “perpetual exile” to the Karaganda region in Kazakhstan. In 1956 he was rehabilitated and was permitted to return to Moscow where he was active as a translator and journalist. He wrote several books and published memoirs on General Lukács, Haji Mamsurov (who fought in Spain under the name of Colonel Xanthi), Ilya Ehrenburg and Ernest Hemingway.

His poem “Looming Autumn, Yellow Bushes…” was published in 1932 and was very popular in literary émigré circles. The line “Man begins with grief…” from this poem is often cited.

Eisner lived most of his life in emigration in Prague. He was called “the most talented of the Prague writers” by Yury Ivask in his anthology of two waves of emigration. Eisner was a member of the Prague group Skit poetov (Monastery of Poets), led by A. L. Bem, which made a cult of Boris Pasternak and pursued metaphorical language, in contrast to the Parisian writers, who followed Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgy Adamovich and defended subtlety and precision.

Biographical information about Eisner, p.538-539, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Cирена (Siren) by Anna Prismanova

In that land we tried to speak
of thirst, unquenchable thirst,
of a mournful cry that pierced us in the dark
and was halted in mid-flight.

But in the silence there reaches out for us
a steamboat’s cry, the crying of its soul,
it pulls us in, inviting and in parting,
as it sails into the age-old twilight.

This high-flown, antediluvian howl,
that the head and insides both absorb,
that even soaks into the legs –
is the union of peace and anxiety.

The steamboat sails off into the darkness and the night.
But it’s as if the siren’s wail died long ago.
As in the time of crusades when knights
were blessed on their way by ringing church bells.

And we, my dear, will leave like this, exactly,
having spent our last small ounce of arrogance,
we’ll leave – moving restlessly into the night,
we’ll have taken little and won’t have weighed the consequences.

The siren awaits us at the end of the earth,
and I know already the torment that she bears:
she wants us all to follow in her footsteps,
and wishes too we’d leave her all alone.

And so the steamboat howls, and howls the darkness.
I’ve not the strength to counteract these howls.
It’s possible that I myself am howling
inside the funnel of just a boat as this.

by Анна Семёновна Присманова (Anna Semyonovna Prismanova)
a.k.a. Анна Симоновна Присман (Anna Simonovna Prisman)
(Date unknown – before 1953)
translated by Bradley Jordan
from the poetry collection Трубы (Trumpets/Tubes/Pipes)

.

Additional information: There is a dedication in the Russian version, ‘В. Коpвин-Пиотpовcкому‘, omitted from the translation. This refers to Vladimir Lvovich Korvin-Piotrovsky (1891 -1966) who was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright.

I am unsure of the exact date of the poem but a Russian website listing the poetry collection it is from has an end note stating “The poem was included in the anthology In the West: An Anthology of Russian Foreign Poetry. Comp. Y.P.Ivask. New York. Ed. Chekhov. 1953. p. 226.” which refers to the book published in 1953, under the title Na zapade; antologiia russkoi zarubezhnoi poezii (In the West; an anthology of the Russian émigré poetry).

Prismanova is considered comparable to her contemporary, the American poet, Louise Bogan and challenged traditional ideas of femininity in her poetry.

Prismanova’s origins and early life are obscure. She appears in emigration in Paris in the mid-1920s, and her first published collection, Ten’ itelo (Shadow and Body) (1937), contains poems beginning in 1929. She and her poet husband, Aleksandr Ginger, remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Responding to the wave of patriotic feeling and longing for Russia that appeared among emigres after the war, they both accepted Soviet passports, though they continued to live in Paris.

Prismanova was best known in the emigre world for intimate lyrics that manifest her spiritual searching for real truth in herself, in language, and in literary form. Prismanova’s poem “Vera” (1960), about the heroic, revolutionary populist Vera Figner (1852-1942), amazed readers by its portrait of a figure so unlike the poet and her intimate lyrical themes. Overshadowed by the more vocal figures of emigration, she was nevertheless a highly intelligent, subtle, and sensitive poet.

Biographical information about Prismanova, p.342-343, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.

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Cирена

В. Коpвин-Пиотpовcкому
Cтаpалиcь мы cказать на cей земле
о жажде и ее неутоленьи,
о кpике cкоpби, pвущем наc во мгле
и оcтановленном в cвоем cтpемленьи.
Но нам навcтpечу тянетcя в тиши
влекущий наc, пpизывный и пpощальный,
кpик паpоxода, кpик его души,
уже плывущей в cумpак изначальный.
Вбираемый нутpом и головой,
пpоcачивающийcя даже в ноги,
cей выcпpенний и допотопный вой
cлияние покоя и тpевоги.
Во мглу и в ночь уxодит паpоxод.
Но cтон cиpены как бы замеp в оном.
Так pыцаpи в кpеcтовый шли поxод,
напутcтвуемые цеpковным звоном.
И мы, душа моя, вот так, точь-в-точь,
утpатив до конца оcтаток cпеcи,
уйдем – вдвигаяcь неотcтупно в ночь,
немного взяв и ничего не взвеcив.
Cиpена ждет наc на конце земли,
и знаю я – томленье в ней какое:
ей xочетcя и чтоб за нею шли,
и чтоб ее оcтавили в покое…
Так воет паpоxод, и воет тьма.
Пpотиводейcтвовать такому вою
не в cилаx я. Я, может быть, cама
в тpубе такого паpоxода вою.

Папиросники (Cigarette Pedlars) by Sergey Yesenin

Avenues so wretched,
snowbanks, bitter frost.
Desperate little urchins
with trays of cigarettes.
Wandering dirty avenues,
enjoying evil games –
all of them are pickpockets,
all are jolly thieves.
That bunch takes Nikitskaya,
this – Tverskaya Square.
They stand, sombrely whistling,
the livelong day out there.
They dash to all the barrooms
and, with some time to spare,
they pore over Pinkerton
out loud over a beer.
Let the beer be bitter –
beer or not, they’re soused.
All rave about New York,
all dream of San Frantsisk…
Then again, so wretchedly,
they walk out in the frost –
desperate little urchins
with trays of cigarettes.

by Сергей Александрович Есенин (Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin)
a.k.a. Sergey Yesenin / Esenin
(1923)
translated by Boris Dralyuk

A recital of the poem by the actor Кирилл Радциг (Kirill Radzig).

Beneath is the original Russian version of the poem in Cyrillic:

Папиросники

Улицы печальные,
Сугробы да мороз.
Сорванцы отчаянные
С лотками папирос.
Грязных улиц странники
В забаве злой игры,
Все они — карманники,
Веселые воры.
Тех площадь — на Никитской,
А этих — на Тверской.
Стоят с тоскливым свистом
Они там день-деньской.
Снуют по всем притонам
И, улучив досуг,
Читают Пинкертона
За кружкой пива вслух.
Пускай от пива горько,
Они без пива — вдрызг.
Все бредят Нью-Йорком,
Всех тянет в Сан-Франциск.
Потом опять печально
Выходят на мороз
Сорванцы отчаянные
С лотками папирос.

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Information:

Nikitskaya is a radial street that runs west from Mokhovaya Street to Garden Ring in Moscow, between Vozdvizhenka Street (south) and Tverskaya Street (north).

Tverskaya Square is a square in Central Administrative Okrug in Moscow. Belorussky railway station faces the square. The streets which terminate at the square are, in counterclockwise order, Leningradsky Avenue, Gruzinsky Val, 2nd Brestskaya Street, 1st Brestskaya Street, 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, Lesnaya Street, and Butyrsky Val.

Pinkerton likely references to Allan J. Pinkerton (25 August 1819 – 1 July 1884) who was a Scottish–American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He produced numerous popular detective books, ostensibly based on his own exploits and those of his agents. Some were published after his death, and they are considered to have been more motivated by a desire to promote his detective agency than a literary endeavour. Most historians believe that Allan Pinkerton hired ghostwriters, but the books nonetheless bear his name and no doubt reflect his views.